Over the last several years, something I have tried to do is cross reference the content of Tae Kyon, since many people say it led to Tae Kwon Do, while just as many people say it didn't.
What I have is consistant proof through video footage and written text that Tae Kyon gave Tae Kwon Do many of the kicking techniques it now uses.
Why do I make that statement?
1. Consistant footage on Youtube (a great resource btw) that shows Taekyon fighters doing the same kicking attacks (many of the same kicking anyway) modern TKD uses. These include: roundhouse, stepping attacks, spinning kicks, jumping kicks, and jump spinning kicks.
2. The footage from Human Weapon that shows Jason and Bill doing leg techniques that agree with the footage I have seen previously.
3. Written text that corroborates the above.
4. The way we did techniques in my organization that seemed to directly reflect this influence.
I feel a bit strange having to repeat this... I'd have though it were fairly obvious: you cannot use the resemblance between what you are calling Taekyon and TKD to argue that techs from the former were the ancestor of techs from the latter. We have documentary and living-witness attestation that 19th c. taekkyon was essentially extinct early in the 20th c. The 'taekkyon' that you are talking about in connection with TKD there has to be the 'revivalist' art that adopted the name of the earlier form and developed in the post-Korean War era. And what you are claiming is that this art was the source of the resemblant kicks in TKD. But your only evidence for this account of the fact of the resemblance you cite is the resemblance itself! You are leaving out the very thing you need to make your argument work:
evidence that 'taekkyon' was the source of TKD's kicking techs. Do you see what I'm getting at? If you show me two papers written by two different students, A and B, that were handed into two different classes and are word-for-word identical, you cannot say, well, the word-for-word identity is proof that A copied the paper from B. To do that you have to show that the other possibilities—that B copied from A, or that both A and B copied from the third source—are ruled out. That's exactly the thing you aren't doing in your series of posts. All you're doing is in effect shoving the papers into my face and saying, 'But isn't it obvious that A copied from B? Look, they're identical!!'
Given the demography of TKD participation vs. Taekkyon participation, given the early and relentless development of TKD as a point-scoring martial sport and the scoring systems and judging practices that came to reward higher and more flamboyant kicks, and given the training backgrounds of the Kwan founders, their first and second generation students, the case for Taekkyon as the source of TKD's techs is about as weak as you can imagine—particularly because we have a nice control: sport karate undewent the same evolution in its kicks, departing from the low, mean leg techs of the Okinawan source art to the point where high flashy kicks are as common in sport Shotokan competition as they are in Olympic TKD. If you award points for accurate strike to higher targets using techically more difficult moves, and if you tend to ignore less spectacular techniques in favor of the big-ticket spinning/aerial ones, then you are going to get the kinds of kicks we see in both Olympic TKD and sport Karate.
And again, maybe 'many people' say that Taekkyon lead to TKD, but no marital arts historians who have actually
studied the question and published their findings in peer-reviewed journals believe that. Many people also believe that Uri Geller was able to bend spoons with 'mind power', that the Bermuda Triangle contains an evil force which eats boats, and that they can channel the spirits of their distant royal Egyptian ancestors. What people say doesn't signify unless they can offer coherent, noncircular argumentation to support it. And to date, neither you nor anyone else advocating a 'Taekkyon' ancestry for TKD has even begun to come close to doing that.
Now it can be argued that early TKD was very derivative of Shotokan, more or less depending on your Kwan. My argument is that modern TKD directly stems from Taekkyon. I have seen too much proof to believe otherwise.
Then please provide this proof—and it had better not be of the `A clearly copied the paper from B' sort that so far is all you've given, because that is, as I've noted, not proof of anything at all. There is, on the other hand, abundant evidence, recorded in the work of the people I've cited, that TKD derives from Shotokan primarily, that its original tech set was just that of Shotokan, that its high and complex kicks developed steadily in response to the increasing emphasis within the art on martial sport competition. It is very evident however that you are unfamiliar with this research, because any argument designed to support the point you're defending would have to start by explaining away the evidence that I've alluded to. And it seems very strange to me that one would try to have a serious discussion of a historical issue without some basic familiarity with the premier work carried out by historians whose careers are built on the detailed
study of that issue, among others.
Now, if the argument is that TKD and Taekkyon either had nothing to do with each other, or TKD and TK influenced each other (possible), my question is Where Did Those Techniques Come From? Japanese karate doesn't teach technique like that.
Have you observed any sport Karate matches over the past decade? What don't they do in Japanese sport Karate that they do in TKD?
A viewing of Human Weapon-Karate will prove that.
You are seriously saying that one hour of
Human Weapon is your evidence base for the technical content of Japanese Karate???
And a martial art born out Shotokan would not do that either. If you don't learn kicking like that, how would you know to do it?
Would you like to explain (i) how you know that 'a martial art born out Shotokan would not do that either' and (ii) why you think that the techniques you're referring to do not represent normal extensions within the art itself?? Particularly when competitive uses of a martial art inevitably and naturally require modification of what was originally a highly destructive fighting system to suit its new role of athletic spectacle with minimal risk of major injury to the participants? I'm afraid I don't follow your reasoning here even a little bit.
To me, the only plausible explanation is that TK was either there from the beginning or strongly influenced later on.
That's fine as a fact about you. And if you want to leave it there, so far as your own knowledge of TKD is concerned, that's fine too; it doesn't impinge on anyone else. But if you want what
you consider plausible to be taken as plausible by anyone else, you have a lot more work to do than simply reporting your impression of what 'must have' happened. There is now a serious literature on the evolution of TKD, presenting detailed evidence about what did and what did not happen. And to the extent that you ignore that evidence—as you've consistently done in your posts—to that extent you're just talking to yourself, unfortunately.
It is well known that the Chung Do Kwan people consciously wanted to purge TKD of Japanese influence and technique. Fair enough. What do you replace it with? If you purposely implant TKD with TK technique to Koreanize it, then it can be rightly said that modern TKD is a direct descendant of TK. Again, the only other explanation is that TK technique was there from the beginning.
Sorry, no sale. General Choi was one of the foremost of the Japanese-influence purgers, but what he produced to satisfy that requirement was a set of hyungs which looked remarkably unlike the original kata sets that formed the Kwan-era curriculum, but incorporated major chunks of those kata in recombined form. As another of the major TKD technical scholars whose work I gather you're unfamiliar with has noted,
The first patterns that can be considered exclusive to Taekwondo were the Chang Hon forms, composed by General Choi Hong Hi in the years leading up to the founding of the ITF. ... one of Choi's basic motivations was to provide Taekwondo with a set of patterns with a clearly Korean identity... thus, rather than being content to practise the Karate forms in much the same way as Okinawan masters had adopted Chinese hsings, Choi designed a set of patterns which he felt would be more acceptable from a nationalist standpoint.
...They nevertheless owe a great deal to the Karate kata, particularly the Pinan/Heian series. Many sequences are direct transplants from the katas, or sequences in which one or two individual techniques have been substituted
(Simon O'Neil,
Combat TKD, Ch. 1, p. 5). And things were even more like that in the WTF hyungs, which didn't reflect nearly the same intensity of motivation to eliminate the Japanese influence from the art. The very fact that that 'Japanese influence' was associated in particular with the kata sets in the curriculum tells you how much of a role Shotokan played in forming that curriculum. And since rearranging the sequences does not reflect a major change in techniques—the kihons were left the same, and were organized into the same combat-effective subsequences, even in the Chang Hons—there doesn't seem to be any support at all for your supposition that purging TKD of its Japanese ancestry involved a fundamental technical change in the art; what changed was the
appearance of the art. Choi also added the `sine wave' component of movement to TKD techs; I seriously hope you're not going to tell me that he got that from Taekkyon! The techs, with predictable enhancement and modification in the sport-MA direction, the kihon line drills inherited from Funakoshi's university-club training methodology, and most other aspects of the art remained the same. The point is, you 'replace' the most obvious-looking Japanese aspects of the technique, the kata forms that give Okinawan/Japanese karate its most distinctive identity, with patterns that don't (at first sight)
look like those kata. And that's sufficient. So your basic premise in the passage I've quoted has no support, and you have no argument along these lines.
Again, I'd urge you to learn something about the actual
history of TKD, as documented by specialist MA historians (several of whom, e.g. Capener and Adroguès, are advanced dan practitioners of the art as well), before you try to construct arguments on behalf of your impressionistic hunches.
